Sam House Brings Four Feminine Narratives to Café Riche Through Light

Sam House has transformed Café Riche in downtown Cairo with its latest lighting collection, structuring the historic space into four rooms, each shaped around a different female character drawn from a distinct era.

Sam House is the studio of Haysam “Sam” Abdelghafar, an interior and lighting designer whose work explores how objects and spaces carry narrative. “Each room represents a certain woman, and each woman represents a certain era,” he tells SceneHome. For this exhibition, he collaborated with designers, artists and fashion creatives to build out these personas, using light, material and pattern as the primary language.

At the centre of the installation is ‘Aziza’, a series of handcrafted brass lighting pieces where each chandelier, pendant and lamp functions as a focal element within the space. The Kerdan Chandelier references traditional Egyptian gold jewellery, while Dates draws on the forms of palm trees, grounding the collection in familiar visual cues.

The sequence of rooms moves through distinct atmospheres. Aziza opens with softer tones and floral forms, while Lucienne shifts into a more restrained palette, drawing on French references. Hikari introduces sharper contrasts and Japanese-inspired motifs, and Hilda closes with industrial finishes and more sculptural lighting that emphasises material and structure.

The exhibition brings together a range of collaborators, including Maison Saeidi, whose couture pieces move through the spaces, alongside Nineteen Furniture, Wally’s, Khater Curtains, Kahhal 1871, Malvorus and Motion Art Gallery. Their contributions extend the visual language of each room beyond lighting alone. “I didn’t want this to be just our products. Bringing in collaborators made the rooms stronger and the ideas much clearer,” Sam says.

Across the installation, everyday objects are positioned as narrative elements, shaped by references to memory, place and lived experience.